NIST 800-53, Revision 4 Compliance

NIST Special Publication 800-53, Revision 4

According to NIST Special Publication 800-53, Revision 4¹:

[It] provides a catalog of security and privacy controls for federal information systems and organizations and a process for selecting controls to protect organizational operations … , organizational assets, individuals, other organizations, and the Nation from a diverse set of threats ….

The controls are customizable and implemented as part of an organization-wide process that manages information security and privacy risk. The controls address a diverse set of security and privacy requirements across the federal government and critical infrastructure, derived from legislation, Executive Orders, policies, directives, regulations, standards, and/or mission/business needs.

The [NIST 800-53] publication also describes how to develop specialized sets of controls, or overlays, tailored for specific types of missions/business functions, technologies, or environments of operation.

Finally, the catalog of security controls addresses security from both a functionality perspective (the strength of security functions and mechanisms provided) and an assurance perspective (the measures of confidence in the implemented security capability). Addressing both security functionality and security assurance ensures that information technology products and the information systems built from those products using sound systems and security engineering principles are sufficiently trustworthy.

How Thales can help

Core Thales capabilities that help meet all these NIST 800-53, Revision 4 compliance standards include:

• Data discovery and classification: Find and classify according to risk sensitive data across your organization’s heterogeneous data stores including the cloud, big data, and traditional data storage environments.
• Access Policies and Privileged User Controls: Restrict access to encrypted data – permitting data to be decrypted only for authorized users and applications, while allowing privileged users to perform IT operations without the ability to see protected information.
• Encryption and Key Management: Strong, centrally managed, file, volume and application encryption combined with simple, centralized key management that is transparent to processes, applications and users.
• Security Intelligence: Logs that capture access attempts to protected data, providing high value security intelligence information that can be used with a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions and for compliance reporting.

For a full look at how Thales solutions map to NIST 800-53 compliance requirements, see our CipherTrust NIST 800-53 Mapping white paper with detailed mapping of security controls to Thales product features.

In addition to helping you comply with NIST 800-53, Revision 4; FISMA; FIPS 140-2; FIPS 199; FIPS 200 and FedRAMP, CipherTrust security solutions from Thales are designed to help you comply with:

• HIPAA-HITECH
• PCI DSS
• CPCC
• GDPR
• Other standards that will arise

¹ https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/sp/800-53/rev-4/final

Thales helps organizations comply with NIST 800-53 Revision 4 through:

• Strong access management and authentication to ensure only credentialed users can retrieve the data
• Data-centric protection and cryptographic key management that ensure that if data is stolen, it is meaningless and therefore useless to cybercriminals
• Security intelligence logs to identify irregular access patterns and breaches in progress

Data Discovery and Classification

The first step in protecting sensitive data is finding the data wherever it is in the organization, classifying it as sensitive, and typing it (e.g. PII, financial, IP, HHI, customer-confidential, etc.) so you can apply the most appropriate data protection techniques. It is also important to monitor and assess data regularly to ensure new data isn’t overlooked and your organization does not fall out of compliance.

Thales’ CipherTrust Data Discovery and Classification efficiently identifies structured as well as unstructured sensitive data on-premises and in the cloud. Supporting both agentless and agent-based deployment models, the solution provides built-in templates that enable rapid identification of regulated data, highlight security risks, and help you uncover compliance gaps. A streamlined workflow exposes security blind spots and reduces remediation time. Detailed reporting supports compliance programs and facilitates executive communication.

Strong access management and authentication

Thales Access Management and Authentication solutions provide both the security mechanisms and reporting capabilities organizations need to comply with data security regulations. Our solutions protect sensitive data by enforcing the appropriate access controls when users log into applications that store sensitive data. By supporting a broad range of authentication methods and policy driven role-based access, our solutions help enterprises mitigate the risk of data breach due to compromised or stolen credentials or through insider credential abuse.

Support for smart single sign on and step-up authentication allows organizations to optimize convenience for end users, ensuring they only need to authenticate when needed. Extensive reporting allows businesses to produce a detailed audit trail of all access and authentication events, ensuring they can prove compliance with a broad range of regulations.

Protection of sensitive data at rest

The CipherTrust Data Security Platform is an integrated suite of data-centric security products and solutions that unify data discovery, protection, and control in one platform.

• Discover: An organization must be able to discover data wherever it resides and classify it. This data can be in many forms: files, databases, and big data, and it can rest across storage on premises, in clouds, and across back-ups. Data security and compliance starts with finding exposed sensitive data before hackers and auditors. The CipherTrust Data Security Platform enables organizations to get complete visibility into sensitive data on-premises and in the cloud with efficient data discovery, classification, and risk analysis.
• Protect: Once an organization knows where its sensitive data is, protective measures such as encryption or tokenization can be applied. For encryption and tokenization to successfully secure sensitive data, the cryptographic keys themselves must be secured, managed and controlled by the organization. The CipherTrust Data Security Platform provides comprehensive data security capabilities, including file-level encryption with access controls, application-layer encryption, database encryption, static data masking, vaultless tokenization with policy-based dynamic data masking, and vaulted tokenization to support a wide range of data protection use cases.
• Control: The organization needs to control access to its data and centralize key management. Every data security regulation and mandate requires organizations to be able to monitor, detect, control, and report on authorized and unauthorized access to data and encryption keys. The CipherTrust Data Security Platform delivers robust enterprise key management across multiple cloud service providers (CSP) and hybrid cloud environments to centrally manage encryption keys and configure security policies so organizations can control and protect sensitive data in the cloud, on-premise and across hybrid environments.
• Monitor: Finally, the enterprise needs to monitor access to sensitive data to identify ongoing or recent attacks from malicious insiders, privileged users, APTs, and other cyberthreats. CipherTrust Security Intelligence logs and reports streamline compliance reporting and speedup threat detection using leading Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems. The solution allows immediate automated escalation and response to unauthorized access attempts and provides all the data needed to build behavioral patterns required to identify suspicious usage by authorized users.

Protection of sensitive data in motion

Thales High Speed Encryptors (HSEs) provide network independent data-in-motion encryption (Layers 2,3 and 4) ensuring data is secure as it moves from site-to-site, or from on-premises to the cloud and back. Our HSE solutions allow customers to better protect data, video, voice, and metadata from eavesdropping, surveillance, and overt and covert interception—all at an affordable cost and without performance compromise.

Protection of cryptographic keys

Luna HSMs from Thales provide a hardened, tamper-resistant environment for secure cryptographic processing, key generation and protection, encryption, and more. Available in three FIPS 140-2 certified form factors, Luna HSMs support a variety of deployment scenarios.

In addition, Luna HSMs:

• Generate and protect root and certificate authority (CA) keys, providing support for PKIs across a variety of use cases
• Sign your application code so you can ensure that your software remains secure, unaltered, and authentic
• Create digital certificates for credentialing and authenticating proprietary electronic devices for IoT applications and other network deployments